After all, what other options does the SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES have in dealing with a president?

Sure, it’s possible that some incompetent bastard who slid thru the confirmation process might allow the suit to go forward, but it is far more likely that the judge, after s/he stops laughing, would gavel down the suit and yell at the SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to get out of her/his courtroom, quit wasting everyone’s time, go back to Congress and do his job.

Hell, I’d pay five bucks for a seat in the courtroom to see that happen.

I’d also like to do more, and to do more is most often to do what I don’t know how to do.

Which means I’ll be terrible when I first do it.

Now, I keep playing because I’d like to get better, because I think I can at some point do it well. I didn’t re-up with the Gotham Rock Choir because I wasn’t convinced that more practice would make me a sufficiently better singer. It’s one thing to be terrible on the way to getting better, but quite another to be terrible on the way to mediocrity.

Rather takes away one’s motivation to practice.

I doubt I’ll ever be great on the guitar—that fucking F chord—but with practice I am improving, enough so that I can gull myself into practicing even more.

So, at some point, I’ll be merely terrible, then mediocre, and then all right. I don’t know that I’ll ever get beyond all right, but, for now, it’s enough to know that I can at least get that far, and that it’s just possible that I could, someday, be good.

Time to try something else to be terrible at, then. I’ve long wanted to learn French. . . .

I am admittedly ambivalent on the prospects of Hillary Clinton running for president.

I’d dearly love to see a woman president, but if I thought Russ Feingold had half a chance in Hades of becoming prez, I’d vote for him in a New York minute.

She’s just too. . . conservative for me to get hepped up about her.

(That said, if she’s the nominee, you can be damned sure I’ll vote for her over Ted Cruz or Rick Perry or Scott Walker: “voting while sighing” is preferable to “smashing an icepick thru my eye socket”.)

In any case, she’s received a fair amount of (mostly negative) press on her tetchiness with Terry Gross, and, honestly, her inability to give a decent answer to mildly skeptical questions about her “evolution” on gay marriage is ridiculous. She changed her mind, it’s clear she changed her mind, and yet this woman who had adopted a wonderfully FuckIt attitude while Secretary of State somehow froze up when confronted with that known aggressor Gross.

Not that it’ll matter. She might get some grief about it in the primary, but chances are her opponents will also have “evolved” on the issue and will be unwilling to press her too hard. If she makes it to the general, it won’t matter at all: many Americans who today favor same-sex marriage probably had the same views about the issue in the 1990s as Clinton did, and thus won’t hold her changing views against her.

Hell, they might even feel reassured by her vagueness about exactly when and why her views changed, not least because the course of their own change is similarly vague.

Those of who pay attention to politics often want some kind of consistency or thru-line in their candidates and politicians; we want, in some weird kind of way, for them to be better than us—or, vainly, for them to be good enough to deserve our support.

But we’re not normal—most people don’t pay attention to politics—and it’s not at all clear that the characteristics we prize or deplore in politicians matters much to the folks who don’t tune in to the race before that last Labor Day before the election.

And for better and for worse, they’re the ones who’ll have the final say on who the next president is.

Because I would have thrown a whisky bottle thru the screen had I witnessed even one of the incompetent bastards who pom-pommed us in the clusterfuck otherwise known as Operation Iraqi Freedom opine on the necessity of US military intervention in the chaos which is a direct result of the clusterfuck known as Operation Iraqi Freedom.

We owe the Iraqis, we do. We stomped into and all over their country, and while we may have liberated them from the misery of Saddam Hussein’s reign, it was only into another kind of misery. And now the psychopaths operating under the unfortunately-cool acronym of ISIS are marauding thru the country offering their own particularly murderous version of misery.

But I don’t know that there’s much we can do to make the situation better, and f we can’t make it better, we can at least have the decency not to make it worse.